All last year, Susan Hopkins watched out the back window of her new $191,000 house in northwest suburban Bartlett as workers laid the foundation for a nearby elementary school.
Hopkins looked forward to next fall when her 4-year-old son, Steve, would start kindergarten there and make friends with other Bartlett children.
Earlier this month, however, the 36-year-old homemaker and ex-teacher had to tell her son that he would not attend the school that could be seen from the back yard, as the subdivision`s developer had said. Instead, he would be bused more than 4 miles through two forest preserves to Wayne.
”He said `Why?` ” Hopkins recalls. ”I said `Steve, I don`t know.` ”
Tales of woe like that told by Hopkins are increasingly heard in the Chicago area`s high-population growth areas such as western Du Page County, northwest Cook County, the Fox River Valley and Lake County, where homeowners who spent their savings to buy into certain communities now find their children shuttled off to different towns altogether.
”As the area becomes more and more urbanized and developed, there are going to be questions arising about (school) boundaries,” said Gary Jewel, superintendent of West Aurora School District 129. ”A lot of these boundaries are historic and went back to when the area was rural. But when the area becomes urbanized and more populated, it may not make sense any more.”
More developments in an area means more children flood into a school district, overcrowding schools until planners are forced to construct new buildings and redraw attendance area maps-to the displeasure of parents.
It`s unusual to find parents at school board meetings discussing the nitty-gritty of school finance or which math textbook to buy. But when officials try to switch kids` schools, once-apathetic parents show up at neighborhood meetings roaring like lions defending their cubs.
The residents of Hopkins` neighborhood were no exception, turning out in droves for a heated, catcall-filled meeting last week with officials from Elgin Unit School District 46, which encompasses Hopkins` subdivision in Bartlett.
”You`re going to create a band of nomads among our children,” Hopkins told school administrators and nearly 200 people.
But Hopkins and her neighbors were not the only ones in the crowd with a grievance. They found themselves shouted down by parents from a Carol Stream development.
Carol Stream residents also want their children to go to the new school, have suffered longer, and are ”disenfranchised,” one Carol Stream man said. He said his son cried after learning he would be shuttled off to yet another school. A mother complained that her boy would be attending his fifth school this fall.
Officials from the developer of Hopkins` neighborhood, Lexington Homes, said they were under the impression the subdivision would send children to the new school. But U46 officials maintain they never made any promises about who would attend the school.
The administrators said the new school lacked the capacity to absorb children from Hopkins` subdivision, and they had to send the youngsters down Army Trail Road to Wayne. Officials said they always try to keep communities together, but ultimately have to craft a boundary map that is best for the sprawling district as a whole.
It is the existence of such large districts spread over multiple municipalities that result in children being bused farther away, said Douglas Hoeft, regional superintendent of schools for Kane County and president of the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of School.
A 1948 state law allowing for the consolidation of two school districts into one created wide-ranging districts with haphazard boundaries, Hoeft said. ”Let`s say the Elgin public school system was one of the finest school districts in the state of Illinois, and let`s say there were five farmers in Streamwood who wanted to send their children there. Elgin had no ability to say no (under the 1948 law). Elgin could do nothing.
”That`s why the Elgin school district includes Streamwood, Hanover Park, Ontarioville, West Chicago, Carol Stream, Wayne, and South Elgin. Now it`s the second-largest school district in the state of Illinois because of the consolidation effort.”
The popularity of the ”consolidation” of children has waned as farms turned into modern subdivisions. Despite suburbanites` high mobility-or maybe because of it-suburban homeowners insist on maintaining solid ties to their community and resist attempts to have their children spend six hours daily in another town.
”Once you get (into a school district), you establish some very emotional ties. It`s, `Well, I bought my house here, my kid was starting quarterback, and if you move my boundary, you don`t want him to be starting quarterback,` ” Hoeft said.
More Top Picks Best Desk Lamps For Eye Strain
Residents` attachment to their town or subdivision can cause them to drain their pocketbooks and battle well-financed school districts for years over a boundary.
In 1985, for example, a school principal told Mary Martin she and her kindergartner had come to register at the wrong school. Martin started her six-year-long struggle to deannex her neighborhood from the West Chicago school district.
Martin and her neighbors live in a Warrenville development. They want their children to go to school with the rest of the Warrenville youngsters they meet in Park District baseball leagues, Scouts, church or their neighborhood.
But Martin and her allies live on the edge of Warrenville, on the wrong side of the dividing line that separates the combined Warrenville-Wheaton school district from the West Chicago district. Consequently, people like Martin`s neighbor, Mark Neubauer, must send his daughter Rachel to a West Chicago elementary school.
The situation has created painful moments, such as when Rachel Neubauer came home crying after her 2nd-grade teacher told her pupils to write down their addresses. Rachel dutifully listed Warrenville as her town, but the teacher assumed she must live in West Chicago like her classmates.
”Her teacher marked it wrong and told her she lived in West Chicago. She was in tears and said, `I don`t want to say I live in West Chicago, but I don`t want to be marked wrong,` ” remembered Martin.
Meanwhile, Martin pays $2,500 yearly for tuition to send her four children to St. Irene`s Catholic School in Warrenville. She and other homeowners have spent $23,000 in legal fees since the issue became a Du Page County Circuit Court case. Whether her children can ever attend public school in Warrenville is still up in the air; the issue is pending before the Second District Appellate Court in Elgin.
As long as school district boundaries do not match municipal borders, homeowners such as Martin who want to switch districts to educate their children in their hometown will have to appeal to higher authorities.
Parents such as Hopkins, who finds her children being bused from one village to another within a single district, may eventually find some relief. When a new suburb fills with families, more schools will be built, making it more likely a child can attend classes nearby. As population stabilizes, homeowners may enjoy a period of serenity where their children will attend one elementary school uninterrupted, just like their parents envisioned when they moved in, administrators said.
But as children grow up and enrollment declines, schools must be shuttered. The process starts over again and angry parents crowd school gyms to protest school closings.
A veteran of such a fight is Trish Laipple, president of the Talala School Parent Teacher Organization in south suburban Park Forest. She and others successfully battled administrators who, citing declining attendance, wanted to close the elementary school.
She had never imagined that Talala, located smack in the center of town, would have been threatened with closing. Her advice to young parents buying homes: ”Really check it out. Check out the school district.”